In the new world of unregulated lending, families are barraged with advertisements and offers for a new product:  all the debt they could ever want, and more.  Now, in a single year, more than five billion preapproved credit card offers — totaling over $350,000 of credit per family — pour into mailboxes all across America.
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Motherhood is now the single-best indicator that an unmarried middle-class woman will end up bankrupt.  In the world of financial devastation, there are two groups of people: single mothers and others.
— Elizabeth Warren & Amelia Warren Tyagi, The Two-Income Trap

There’s nothing new or exotic about the problems faced by American families today.  Jobs have come and gone, couples have broken up, and illnesses and injuries have been facts of life since the first caveman kissed the first cavewoman good-bye and headed off to the hunt.  But the Two-Income Trap compounded the ordinary risks of […]

Today’s bankrupt families are deeper in debt than their counterparts just twenty years earlier, and their overall financial picture — assets and debts — is worse.  In 1981, the median family filing for bankruptcy owed 80 percent of total annual income in credit card and other nonmortgage debts; by 2001, that figure had nearly doubled […]

What happens when unforeseen disaster strikes — when Dad loses his job or when Mom asks for a divorce?  Families face events that elude all careful planning.  The first line of defense is their all-purpose passbook savings account, an account that is tax-disadvantaged.  If things get really bad, many families find that the only way […]

Money isn’t that hard.  Getting straight with your money can be challenging — in the sense that you may have to make some difficult choices and break some long-standing habits — but it isn’t complicated.  You don’t have to be great at math, and you don’t have to understand a lot of specialized financial terms.  […]

A family with children is now [2003] 75 percent more likely to be late on credit card payments than a family with no children.  The number of car repossessions has doubled in just five years.  Home foreclosures have more than tripled in less than 25 years, and families with children are now more likely than […]

Bankruptcy has become deeply entrenched in American life.  This year [2003], more people will end up bankrupt than will suffer a heart attack.  More adults will file for bankruptcy than will be diagnosed with cancer.  More people will file for bankruptcy than will graduate from college.  And, in an era when traditionalists decry the demise […]

Ah, to have enough. Enough money to pay the bills. Enough to have a little fun. Enough to put something aside for the future. Enough to feel some real confidence. Sounds good, doesn’t it? 
 
Have you ever wondered why one person can manage just fine on $40,000 a year, while another person is in big trouble on […]

What about those families with middle-class aspirations who earned a little less than average or those who lived in a particularly expensive city? Even with both parents in the workforce, they have fallen behind. Rather than drop out of the bidding war [for suitable homes] and resign themselves to sending their kids to weaker schools, […]

Your bills tell your past, but they also tell your future. Every debt, every monthly payment, every dollar you owe is a claim against your future. Debt affects what you can — and cannot — do about your future. And when you pay off the credit cards and IOUs, you open up new worlds of […]